Porn Drives Demand
by Roger C.
Dietrich was born into a large family in Breslau Germany. The year was 1906 and young Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the son of a psychiatrist father and a schoolteacher mother would have seven siblings. Later in life, he, along with his brother and two brothers-in-law would be executed by the Nazis during World War 2. But before that end, Dietrich completed a Doctor of Theology degree when he was only 21. He rose to prominence as a paster-theologian during the 1930s, as the Nazi Party was also rising in power. His strong faith, exposure to the social injustices in American black culture, and the church’s ineptitude to address them gave rise to his evolvement as a leading voice against Nazism. One of the Nazi’s first actions after they assumed control was to seize sectors that shaped public opinions – the arts, cinema and radio. They removed anything they did not see as supportive of a new vision, and favored arts that reinforced the narratives they wanted the German people to think and feel. They made laws that oppressed what they deemed racially inferior people, and created death camps to systematically eliminate them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer openly opposed the Nazis, led an underground seminary, and joined a resistance effort to remove Hitler by planting a bomb at his hideout. He argued that Christians should not retreat from the world, but act in it. He was sent to Flossenburg concentration camp and hung two weeks before US troops liberated the camp. He was 39.
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer was a man who “understood the times” (1 Chr 12:32). He clearly saw how the Nazi Party attempted to control the narrative while hiding their sinister plans to eradicate the jewish people and bring greater oppression and control over the German people. He also saw how he would be complicit in that oppression if he remained silent, if he failed to take action, if he distracted himself with lesser things. I’ve been to Flossenburg. The people there claim they didn’t know what was happening at the camp, that they assumed they were criminals. Was that what they truly believed, or the narrative they accepted to justify their ignorance? Let’s take a step back from the supply side of sexual exploitation and look at what drive that growth – demand. What in our society supports sexual exploitation? What impact does it have on everyone? Will we accept the narrative or be men of action?
Follow the Money
Criminal Investigators often advise others to “follow the money.” If we look at the enormity of the money being made from the sex industry, it boggles the mind. This is profitable for pimps because, unlike drugs, they can reuse this product for years, continuing to earn income off selling women and children. One statistic is that 1 year of servitude for a human trafficking victim averages 200-520 times men have raped them. The average age and income of a domestic pimp is 30, earning $ 200,000 a year. Add the income from stripping, massage parlors, escort services, pornography and more and this is a 150 billion dollar industry. It is a massive criminal industry that enslaves somewhere between 20-40 million people worldwide. That is a lot of motivation for traffickers to continue. Where money is to be made, a system often emerges that controls the narrative, protects the distribution and silences the victims.
Industry
I recently listened to a podcast called Exodus Cry, interviewing a woman who was charmed by a young boyfriend who convinced her to move to Las Vegas with him, and when they arrived he immediately forced her to work the night as a call girl. She was trapped for six years and revealed that the illusion of “happy hookers” or “independent sex workers” was all a lie. 99% of the prostitutes were trafficked into that life, and she relayed how everyone got a cut of the action: traffickers, pimps, hotel doormen, hotel restaurants, drivers, everybody. The enabling infrastructure was larger than the trafficker who stole her or the Johns she serviced. Everyone was in on it. Money has that impact, especially for those without scruples. Behind all the narratives of empowerment, sexual liberation, human rights, free speech, porn literacy and decriminalization are the truths that women and children are being bought and sold into slavery. The truth is exploitation, violence, diseases, mental health issues, suicide, murder, rape, torture and worse.
MindGeek/Pornhub
MindGeek is an international company that “delivers a world-class portfolio of entertainment experiences and IT solutions to a global customer base.” Based in Montreal, Canada, they boast 115 million visitors a day, 3 billion in ad impressions, 15 terabytes upload content and 1000 employees. If you visited their website, you’d think they were just another IT company. Cover narrative, illusion, and lies. The reality is they generate more traffic than Amazon, Facebook or Twitter; collect more user data than Netflix and Hulu; have detailed biographies of each user which they use to create hyper-personalized ads; and owns over 100 of the most popular and lucrative…porn sites, including the largest, Porn Hub. With Pornhub, MindGeek essential created the YouTube of porn. The site allows users to upload their own content, leading to huge and probably criminal problems. Porn Hub’s empire is massive. In 2019 alone, the site boasted over 42 billion visits and 39 billion searches. Pornhub experiences 80,000 searches on their website…every minute. They amass billions of income in these ways. Porn Hub harvests and monetizes vast amounts of user data as an asset to share with advertisers and other companies. The sell premium subscriptions for $9.99/month. Their ad revenue comes from selling banners and sidebar ads real estate, as well as ads placed directly in front of or behind videos for sale. Porhhub developed “Model Hub,” the fastest growing adult marketplace, letting “models” sell their videos at any price. PornHub takes a 35% cut of earnings from video sales. They fully support messages to legalize and decriminalize “sex work” and to allow “empowered women” to be sole contractors. Pornhub actively hunts popular social media outlets like TikTok, Twitch, Snapchat, Periscope and others using models and videos as their bait to lure innocent kids into their orbit. In 2019, their top search terms on the site were “teen,” “cartoon,” and ‘revenge.” Many videos on the site tag popular kid’s shows, making it easy for kids searching for their favorite cartoon characters to accidentally stumble onto porn. In spite of corporate messaging and public relations through charities, billboards, apparel and trade shows, Porn Hub is deeply involved in very dark activity.
Porh Hub is involved in at least sex areas of criminal behavior: human trafficking, child sexual abuse material, rape/sexual assault, revenge porn, non-consensual recordings, and filmed prostitution. Researchers and recent court cases have revealed videos of a 15 year old girl who was trafficked and missing for more than a year before she was seen on Porh Hub, videos of a 14 year old girl who was kidnapped at knifepoint and raped for 12 hours as she was filmed and her video uploaded, and numerous other actual rapes and assaults. Over 100 women won a court case after GirlsDoPorn owners tricked them into modeling jobs then coerced them into porn videos. The Internet Watch Foundation identified 118 examples of child sexual abuse material on Porn Hub. Numerous other examples exist of revenge porn being uploaded or secret recordings from locker rooms or private pictures being filmed and uploaded without consent. Traffickers often film prostitution events in order to keep making money from the event. Porn Hub further enables criminal acts by failing to have age verification and anonymous uploading, ignoring customer complaints of questionable videos, allowing private folders for messaging, launching their own VPN for added secrecy and developing a dark web to further hide client activity, like child porn and trafficking activity.
The industry has reportedly exploded with the Covid-19 lockdowns. They have launched advertising campaigns to draw in new viewers. They are exploiting rising unemployment, greater use of teleworking, and late nights working with offers of free premium service. Some McDonald’s employees were targeted with invitations to sell their photos to make money during the shutdowns. This industry will exploit all vulnerabilities to make money.
A Pornified and Complicit Culture
Aside from the money, what drives the increased demand for sexual exploitation? Where did it start? Sexual abuse has been around beginning in Genesis, but the modern explosion, or the ‘big bang’ began in December 1952 when Hugh Hefner first published Playboy magazine. Strangely, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ aired that same year. What a contrast. He shifted the narrative about what it meant to be a man, what it meant to be a woman, and how society understood sex. According to Benjamin Nolot of Exodus Cry, Hefner’s narrative had three messages: 1) men are sexual predators, 2) women are sex objects, and 3) sex is meaningless and just recreational. While it started with the carefully crafted images of an older man surrounded by a harem of women, enjoying sex at his whim, the “playboy” life influenced everything. Men began to find validation from other men based on sexual conquests. Men felt entitled to women and the adage “sex sells” still dominates advertisement marketing. Women received the message that their worth was based on their sexuality, rather than their character and contributions. Women’s empowerment movements merged with this and women began to view their value as women by gaining sex appeal. We have built up such a high tolerance to nudity, that seeing a movie without a sex scene is noted as something missing from the norm. The sexual revolution of the 1960s created this free love environment that we see today as the hookup culture, sexting and worse.
The culture we live in has conditioned us, and exposure to pornography accelerates our taste for more aggression, more perversity and more entitlement. Studies show that porn leads men to greater sexual aggression. Men become more manipulative to get sexual fulfillment and more entitled to what they desire. Men have been noted as having “male rage” over relational frustrations, self inadequacy, childhood issues resulting in a greater sense of entitlement and violence towards women. The darkness of porn has become increasingly degrading as seen in BDSM, strangulation, multiple partners, dirty talk, etc. The category with the highest growth at present is “teen.” Porn is normalizing deviance, predatory or illegal behaviors, racism, child sex, incest, bestiality and degradation. The pressure for increasingly violent and younger novelty is driving the demand for this in trafficking and numbing compassion for those enslaved victims. Exposure to porn has been shown to increase entitlement towards women, violent sexual behavior and trivializes abuse against women. Porn results in less willingness to intervene in situations where women face sexual harassment or assault.
Our kids are being changed too. 66% of children in one study, were unwilling exposed to nudity online by the age of 17. Many of those will begin to seek out more to view. In 2016, a study by the Barna Group discovered that 57% of teens between the ages of 13-17 willingly watched porn at least once a month. Adolescents who use porn face damage to their brain growth. Healthy growth is an increase in gray matter and signal speed from the prefrontal cortex to the limbic system, which results in more impulse control, compassion and creatitivity, and a decrease in gray matter in the limbic brain, resulting in better control of emotions, anxiety and impulsivity. It only takes 3 hours of porn a week to reverse this growth pattern in the opposite direction with obvious problems. The reward processes are affected by “supernormal” rewards from the dopamine experienced from porn use. As their neural pathways are forming, they will have imbalanced emotional and reflective skills, more dopamine receptivity, greater risk taking and sexual exploration. The impact of viewing mainstream porn showing gagging, choking, rough anal sex, ejaculating on the face, spitting, hair pulling, racial and verbal abuse will affect their view of women and sexual behavior. Porn is training them to believe this is what they should do, how they should behave, and that they need porn to find arousal. The patterns that results are to be expected; increased isolation and shame, and acting out.
Aside from the mental impacts on men, many of us have seen the results of sexual addictions. The downward spiral has led many men to go places they never knew they could, often resulting in lost marriages and even criminal conduct. Porn increases social anxieties and isolation. It results in physical loss of interest and an inability to perform without porn. Hugh Hefner reportedly had nights with his harem where he never touched the women; he masturbated to porn instead. Relationships are destroyed as spouses face betrayal trauma, psychological abuse, post traumatic stress and often institutional betrayal from advice that they contributed to their husband’s issue. Children are left without the full attention of fathers and face the wounds of absence and neglect. Addiction recovery is a long road, with much greater costs than most expected.
The culture surrounding this is enabling sexual assaults. Our society is complicit in allowing and accepting deviance and clear abuse of the most vulnerable. Exposure has created a callousness towards women, in particular, and both aggression and degradation. As a society, we have become “comfortably numb.”
Correct the Narrative
False Narratives
Connect the Dots
Porn leads men to be more sexually aggressive, to desire to act out, and to be less willing to speak out
Porn leads women to be more submissive and easier to manipulate
We face increases in child sexual abuse, child on child sexual assault, 100k kids trafficked in US/year,
sexting, incest, teen brain damage, young adult erectile dysfunction, rise in sexual assaults, 40M people exploited worldwide
Childhood abuse, financial hardship for children & women > shame and vulnerability > easy coercion targets
150B Money > the sex industry actively hunts the vulnerable
Watching porn supports trafficking the vulnerable children and women
Porn drives demand
You can do something about this. You can help end it.
Shared Brokenness
Do you see some of the commonalities men facing sexual addiction have with women trapped in sexual exploitation?
Sex work leads women to protect themselves by splitting their identity from their behavior, yet eventually begin to identify with their behavior.
Shame is often based in fear of rejection and loss of primary relationships. Finding communities of acceptance helps sexually exploited women leave their past.
Many women faced abusive childhoods, leaving them hungering for attention, affirmation and love.
There are children and women sold into sexual slavery, aided by a porn culture, sex industry and predators
Action steps
If prostitution is the main act, porn is the dress rehearsal ~ book ‘The Johns’ by Victor Malarek
Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate ~ 2016 movie Inception
For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved ~ 2 Peter 2:19
All that is required for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing ~ Edmund Burke
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer